The vagaries of UK knife crime statistics

Up to 60,000 young people, mostly male, may be stabbed and injured each year, the equivalent of more than 160 victims a day, according to a worst-case estimate for knife violence in England and Wales.

On the other hand, the figure may be around 22,000 each year for victims aged 10 - 25-year-old.

The different between the two estimates - derived from the questioning of around 600 under-25s about whether they had been "knifed or stabbed", and then extrapolated to the wider population, with all the statistical vagaries that entails - reflects the lack of precise information about the scale of knife crime in England and Wales.

It is also unclear whether knife crime is going down or up. Available official statistics suggest it has fallen since the mid-1990s, but the Government concedes the limited figures are far from reliable.

The death of Adam Regis, aged 15, at the weekend, and the stabbing of Kodjo Yenga, a 16-year-old, last week do little to dispel the perception that knife violence is a major problem, though it remains the case that knife murders - for which there are reliable figures - are rare.

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The two deaths also reflect a reality which is widely acknowledged, even if the scale is unclear. If you are young, male, black or Asian, and you live in a high-crime inner city area, you are far more likely to be a victim of knife violence.

John Reid, for once eschewing the promise of instant legislation, acknowledged the gaps in the picture yesterday when he committed the Home Office to collecting better statistics on the use of knives in crime.

New laws - or perhaps another knife amnesty - would probably have little effect. Knife crime has grown in the last three decades despite the passage of various laws. Last year's Violent Crime Reduction Act banned the sale of knives to anyone under 18.

It was already an offence under the Prevention of Crime Act 1953 to have an offensive weapon in a public place; this includes ''any article made or adapted for use for causing injury to the person, or intended by the person having it with him for such use by him or by some other person''.

The Restriction of Offensive Weapons Act 1959 banned the carrying, manufacture, sale, purchase, hire or lending of flick-knives and ''gravity knives''. The Criminal Justice Act 1988 contained a list of prohibited martial arts-style weapons and made it an offence to carry an article with a blade or sharp point in a public place. The Offensive Weapons Act 1996 made it illegal to sell knives to children under 16. The Knives Act 1997 prohibited the marketing of combat knives.

There is a wide recognition in policing and criminal justice circles that, unlike gun crime, the pattern of knife crime has not been closely monitored. There is little doubt that gun crime, particularly handgun crime, has more than doubled since Labour came to power - again despite legislation, in the form of a post-Dunblane ban on handguns.

The estimate of up to 57,900 annual "knifing or stabbing" victims comes from the Government's Offending, Crime and Justice Survey (OCJS) which, like the bigger British Crime Survey (BCS), questions people about their experiences of crime.

However, because the number of victims of violence in such surveys are relatively small, extrapolated conclusions are correspondingly less reliable.

The BCS suggests the number of violent incidents involving knives in 2005/2006 was, at 169,000, around half the level of 340,000 in 1995, though it had increased on 2004 - 2005 and had been rising since the previous year The proportion of overall violent incidents involving knives was eight per cent in 1995 and seven per cent in 2005 - 2006.

BCS findings also suggest that the use of knives in woundings, common assaults and robberies followed similar patterns - significant falls on 1995 but an upwards trend since 2003. Homicides involving "sharp instruments" - knives and bottles - have fallen since 1995 as a proportion of overall killings. There were 236 in 2004 - 2005.

There is no statistical uncertainty about someone being stabbed to death. However, the accuracy of other findings have been questioned - not only is the sample of victims of violence relatively small but the BCS does not quiz under-16s, a major tranche of victims.

Police recorded crime statistics - traditionally lower than BCS levels - do not reflect the use of knives and few forces have copied the lead of the Metropolitan Police in analysing knife crime.

Scotland Yard said there had been 11,168 "knife-enabled offences" - covering everything from murder to robbery with a knife - in the 10 months to February this year.

If the Met can be held - crudely in statistical terms - to represent around a fifth of England and Wales crime, that might suggest well more than 60,000 knife-enabled crimes a year. Very roughly, that would fit with the belief of some criminologists that knife crime runs at four times gun crime.

However, it is also clear that knife crime - as gun crime - is not evenly spread. Taking out the knife violence which occurs in the home in domestic attacks, the pattern of "public" knife violence shows, in the words of a report from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College, London: "Knife, like other violent crime, is suffered most by the young, the poor and the black and ethnic minority communities."

As with gun crime, there is concern about the increasingly young age at which people admit carrying knifes, in part to feel "safer." Knife violence has emerged in schools and there have been murders in Lincolnshire as well as London. Guns are more difficult for youngsters to obtain.

However, research has suggested that when young white schoolboys admit to having carried a knife, they are talking about legal pen-knives less than three inches in length.

The use of illegal knives is higher for young men from ethnic minority backgrounds and, invariably, from "less safe" inner city areas.